All posts tagged: Sin

God’s Impossible Standards

Published by

Why does God have such impossible standards? No one can live up to them. Take the end of 2nd Corinthians chapter 10, verse 5 for example. It says to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. I don’t know about you, but I can’t do this. I don’t know anyone who can do this. Even Peter, the rock upon whom the Christian church was formed, couldn’t do it. Almost everyone knows the time he denied Christ, shortly after claiming he would die for him. You can read about this in Luke chapter 22. So, if Peter couldn’t meet the standards of God, how can we? The law God gave the Israelites in the Old Testament was a huge burden to them, and they just couldn’t live up to it. That’s why they had rituals and sacrifices to purify themselves from their breaking of the law and sinning against God and each other. That law was put into effect by God to show the Israelites their need for salvation. They could not be righteous on …

Guilty as Sin

Published by

I am guilty as sin Sin is in me. Let’s blame Eve. It was Eve that first gave into the number one temptation since God created us — to be like God. I suppose we could blame Satan who deceived her. By the time Adam came upon the scene, it was too late. Still, like most husbands would, he joined Eve in the one and only thing they were not supposed to do. Eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil meant that they now knew sin. From that moment forward the internal battle raged between trying to do good and wanting to do bad. That is the struggle into which I was born. Into which we are all born. This doesn’t mean that we have to pay for Eve’s sin. It does mean that the consequences of sin are long lasting, even eternal. We suffer the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin. They were kicked out of Eden and their lives became difficult and harsh. I wonder how many conversations they …

Free Sin?

Published by

I watched a movie called the Second Coming of Christ. The devil convinced a scientist to create an immortal gene. If people were immortal there would be no death, no heaven and no hell. And no need for God. At least that’s what the plot was about. What if the consequences of sin were taken away? I am not writing about forgiveness and the spiritual consequences of sin. These are covered in detail in the Bible. But what if we could just sin against ourselves and others and get away with it? I suppose first we need to define sin. Wikipedia states “While sins are generally actions, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, selfish, shameful, harmful, or alienating might be termed sinful.” Sin is not always in direct relation to God; it is in relation to each other as well. So, if we were immortal without God, could we then sin? The short answer is we are free to sin or to not sin regardless of God’s love for us. Being immortal would not …

Exposed!

Published by

I live in Canada and in Canada our current Prime Minister did something years ago that was stupid. At least back then it might have been only stupid but looking back with the modern lens of racism it is now seen as bad. Really bad. For those who don’t know, he colored his face brown and then black on separate occasions and dressed up like a person of color.   He champions himself as anti-racism so this was quite the shock for his followers. According to the media this might just have done him in. Perhaps we will have a new Prime Minister within the month after the election is over. Good thing I am not running for office! My slogan would have to be I sinned! Get over it! Remember the fiasco in the United States regarding the past of Brett Kavanaugh during his process of being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court? His family had to weather a storm like few others have encountered. Which brings me to victims. What about when a …

Is Sin Still a Thing?

Published by

ESPAÑOL: Sigue siendo El Pecado una cosa? One of the buzz words that explains modern society is ‘tolerance.’ It fits nicely with ‘inclusive’ and ‘multicultural’ and other similar sentiments. If you want to be tolerated, you need to be tolerant. Ironically, tolerant people will be intolerant towards you if you are not suitably tolerant. They will judge you for being judgmental. And then there is ‘sin.’ It’s a popular word among old Christians, but it clearly is not tolerant, inclusive or multicultural. A sin is something that is wrong, and needs to be condemned, and possibly forgiven. That idea is judgmental and it does not fit with modern thinking. So, is sin still a thing? I have a job that is new for me, and last week I traveled and stayed in a small-town motel. My room was clean, but the neighbors were a bit scary. They were the kind of people who stay in motels in small towns. One group was a team of furniture movers. They seem to live like gypsies, and they …

What’s Your Problem?

Published by

From a Christian perspective the number one problem in the world is sin. But what does that mean? If this is true should the world be worried? How do I know if sin is in my life? It is at this point that most Christians give a pat answer as we explain all about Adam and Eve and the first sin and God’s grand design that culminates in Jesus’ victory at the cross and resurrection. But here’s the problem with that. It’s true. It is true but not heard because it is a hard message to receive. When I tell someone they are a sinner, but they believe they are essentially good and can point to all the good things they do, it does not compute for them. How unfair it would be, they reason, for God to have me born with original sin. Would a loving God actually have innocent babies born with sin? This doesn’t make sense. Much of what God does, does not make sense to us Christians so how much more …

Mallard ducks Credit: Laura Gooch/Flickr/Creative Commons

Ducks weren’t created to act this way

Published by

My wife and I were driving down a road in Northern Saskatchewan a few days ago when I noticed a kerfuffle on the highway in front of us involving several birds, one of which was a crow. They were obviously fighting. As our vehicle approached, the crow suddenly took off with the other birds in pursuit. In the crow’s beak I could see another bird struggling to get free. I suspect it was a chick of the birds now chasing the crow. The crow had probably dropped the chick on the road and had swooped down to grab it again. I have no idea how this all ended as the birds disappeared over the ditch and into the forest that crowded the highway. But I suspect it did not go well for the chick. It reminded me of another story reported by the BBC. It was based on a report by Zoologist Silviu Petrovan of the University of Cambridge who was researching behaviour of mallard ducks on a lake in Romania. It was a typical …

Ho Chi Minh city (formerly Saigon) Viet Nam. Credit: Colin Key/Flickr/Creative Commons

Original sin

Published by

Studies show that the average person lies about 100 times a day. As one writer tactfully noted, this was not talking about you specifically, but the average person. In the study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman recruited 121 pairs of men and women attending classes at the university to take part in the study. They had no idea what it involved at this point. They were then brought together and asked to have conversations with the other participants. Most of them did not know each other. They were unaware that the conversations were being recorded and researchers received the required permission after, before moving to the next stage. The students were then asked to view the video and to pick out the lies — from the most innocent to the most blatant. They found that over 60% of the participants lied within the first ten minutes of their conversation and told an average of 2.92 lies. They found men and women lied the same amount, …

Credit: Antonio Ponte/Flickr/Creative Commons

Sex addiction is real

Published by

Dr. Stefanie Carnes is president of the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP). She recently came out against those in the therapy community who do not believe people can be sex addicts. IITAP provides materials and support for those working in the addiction community. She pointed to several studies that show sex addiction is a very real problem. In particular, she cited the recent research of Ji-Woo Seok and Jin-Hun Sohn at Chungnam National University in South Korea. The two work at the university’s brain research institute. Their findings confirmed what earlier studies have shown — sex addiction is real for both men and women. In their study, Seok and Sohn found that people with a sex addiction share many similarities to those with alcohol and drug addictions. Like other addicts, those with a sex addiction spend an inordinate amount of time searching for pornography to satisfy their craving. Sex addicts have the same level of sexual desire as the normal population, but similar to other addictions have a higher degree of wanting …

Credit: Josh & Karen Tanenbarum/Flickr/Creative Commons

Baby Sinners?

Published by

A study by Dr. Vasudevi Reddy, of the Psychology Department at the University of Portsmouth, showed babies learn to lie before they learn to speak.  Her conclusions were reported in the April 2007 edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Dr. Reddy stated that lying started as early as six months. She says through trial and error, babies gain a better understanding in what situations lies work best and by seven months many infants are skilled in the art of deceit. Reddy’s conclusion flies in the face of many behavioral psychologists who — convinced of man’s eternal goodness — don’t believe children start lying until they are four years of age or older, when their brains are more developed. (By this age some argue lying is a learned behavior not an innate one.) But others, mostly parents, have had nagging suspicions that their sweet, innocent child had a dark side. In the course of her research, Reddy studied 50 children and did extensive interviews with their parents. Through this process, Reddy identified a …

Was David's son -- King Solomon -- affected by a generational curse in David's family. Image: Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon by Edward Poynter (1836-1919)/Wikipedia

Generational Curses: Part 3 — Did King David’s family have a generational curse?

Published by

In the first two articles in this series on Generational Curses, I looked at the principles of this curse outlined in Exodus 20:5, where God said the iniquity of the parents would be passed to the children for up to four generations. 5 You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me. (Exodus 20:5 NASV) In this third article, we will study the devastating effects that generational curses had on one particular family — King David’s. This will involve taking a second look at what is conceivably one of the most misinterpreted verses in the Bible. Israel’s greatest illegitimate son In our first article, we studied how it was the iniquity (Hebrew awon) and not the sin (Hebrew chattah) of the parents that would be passed on to the children. In that article, I discussed that while sin refers to the act, iniquity refers to a …

Inheriting sin?

Generational Curses: Part 1 — Inheriting sin?

Published by

Español: Las maldiciones generacionales: Parte 1 – La herencia de pecado? In her article in the Globe and Mail entitled “The Bad Seed,” Carolyn Abraham tells the story of Dan S. (a pseudonym). In 2003, when she wrote this article, the man was sitting on death row in a state prison in the southern US. The court sentenced him to death for the cold-blooded murder of a pizza store manager in a 1991 robbery. When he entered the pizza store, the 24-year-old manager quickly complied with Dan’s demands and handed over all the money in the till. Then Dan forced the manager to his knees and in a gangland style murder, callously shot the employee point-blank in the back of the head. “You should have seen the fat slob begging for his life,” Dan later gloated. He was on a rampage. Prior to this incident, he had committed a number of armed robberies, plus a string of car and credit-card thefts. After the pizza-store hold-up, he robbed six more restaurants and dry cleaning businesses before …

Captured by sin. Photo: Chris Karr/Flickr

The difference between iniquity and sin

Published by

Several years ago, a 10 year-old girl was brutally murdered in the city of Toronto. The murderer cut up her body and deposited it in bags in nearby Lake Ontario. She was kidnapped while walking the few blocks from her friend’s place to her home. The 37 year-old man charged in this brutal murder had no previous record. But he became a suspect when police — while interviewing people in the neighborhood — noticed that he had recently painted his home and installed new carpet. To the trained eye, this was a subtle indicator of an individual trying to cover up a brutal murder. When the police went through his house, they found over 10,000 pornographic images stored on his computer, including some involving children. Though he had committed no previous crimes, the repeated viewing of these images apparently built such a potent stronghold in his life that it eventually manifested itself in the brutal sex slaying of a young girl. For years, I looked upon iniquity as merely another word for sin. Part of …

Photo: Scott Hudson/Foter/CC BY

What are your secrets?

Published by

Police in England were shocked when Melody Casson, 67, confessed to killing her then 18-day old son, Wayne. Melody was 15 years old when she used a cushion to smother her son who wouldn’t stop crying. In 1963, she told police she accidentally killed Wayne by sleeping on him. The coroner ruled the infant’s death accidental. But in February 2014, Casson told police what had actually happened decades earlier. She stated, ‘I can’t take no more of the pain.’ Casson told officers, she had felt guilty about this dark secret that had plagued her for 52 years. According to an article in the Daily Mail, Casson said: ‘This happened when I was a schoolgirl. I’ve been living with this all my life. I knew it was coming. I can’t take no more of the pain.’ However, if a recent survey is right, all of us have secrets that we don’t want anyone to find out about. The survey was released to promote a new movie called “The Woman in Black: Angel of Death” that focuses …

Ethics without God?

Published by

[by Dean Smith] The Boston Globe is reporting that 64 students at Dartmouth College, based in Hanover, New Hampshire, were disciplined, ironically, for cheating on a sports ethics class. Dartmouth, founded in 1769 by a Christian minister, is an Ivy league school. Over 70% of the 280 students in the class were part of Dartmouth’s athletic programs. During exams, students use electronic devices to click the right answer. In this particular class, some students, who didn’t show up for the exam, had given their devices to other students to answer the questions for them.

Does God really want us to use Marijuana?

Published by

A Oklahoma politician is using a strange argument in her attempt to have Marijuana legalized in that state. According to KFOR.com, Senator Constance Johnson quoted the Bible when she along with attorney David Slane announced a petition drive pushing for pot legalization in the birth place of such stars as Will Rogers, Chuck Norris and Ron Howard. Citing Genesis 1:29, Johnson said that Marijuana was among a group of herbs God created for people to use. And God said, ‘See I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seeds, to you it shall be for food.” (Genesis 1:29 NASV) She said: “We’re putting forth Genesis 1:29 as the basis of this campaign. God created this wonderful, miraculous plant and we know that it has been vilified for the last 100 years, and it’s time to change that in Oklahoma.”

After being pronounced dead, a preemie baby comes back to life lying on his mother’s chest

Published by

Jamie along with his twin sister were born at just 27 weeks. Each weighed just two pounds. However, when doctors were unable to resuscitate Jamie after 20 minutes, they pronounced him dead. In tears, his mother, Australian Kate Ogg, asked if she could hold Jamie for a bit to say her last good-bye. She unwrapped Jamie from the blanket and held him against her body skin-to-skin. And for the next couple hours she held and cuddled him. She told Jamie his name and told him that he had a sister. Jamie coughed once early, but doctors said it was just a natural reflex and assured his parents that he was dead.

Will LED lights expose our ‘filthy rags?’

Published by

“And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;” (Isaiah 64:6 NASV) Remember the old slogan, “whiter than white?” For years, laundry soap manufacturers have used a little trick to keep clothes looking white, and it has nothing to do with making them cleaner. Lighter and white clothes in particular have a tendency to yellow as they age. Over time, it can leave the impression clothes aren’t clean. To get around this, manufacturers started adding a substance to the detergent called “Florescent Whitening Agents” (FWAs). A whole range of chemicals fall into this category — including such tongue twisters as tetra-sulfonated triazole-stilbenes. The first of these FWAs was discovered in 1929, which gives you some idea how long this has been going on.

A small footnote on grace

Published by

In my vast experience as a human being, I’ve noticed what appears to be a universal problem.  This humanistic tendency cuts across all economic lines, cultural barriers, age, and societies’ sub-cultures.  Have I piqued your interest? This is the problem: we all try to justify ourselves by comparing our good and bad qualities with others in our peer group. 

Credit: matt kornatz/Flickr/Creative Commons

When your dentist says there is no God because of suffering in the world!

Published by

I couldn’t tell you how many times I have heard people say they can’t believe in God because He allows suffering and evil on the earth such as wars and famines. Much of this is caused by a misunderstanding of earth’s ownership which this video by cvcnow.com portrays. In Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, Satan made a curious offer to Jesus. If the Lord worshiped Satan, he would give Jesus the nations of the world. 

Dabbling along the edges of sin

Published by

Loran Nordgren – a senior lecturer on management at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill – with his team of researchers released a study on how to escape greed and lust. The key is to avoid temptation. Though written from a secular perspective, Nordgren’s message proclaims Biblical truth. In the Book of Proverbs, King Solomon warns about the adulteress: